You don't have an appreciation for the current state of the art in upper limb prostheses. They are getting better all the time, but they are a far cry from restoring the dexterity, speed, range of motion, and fine control of a normal hand. Present prostheses, and forecasting out into the next decade, are functional replacements, but they are far from superior.

That's crazy. No bionic hand is anywhere near as good as the one you grew unless you had a birth defect or ruined the one you had. There's no way anybody will get a bionic hand to have the sense of touch your real one does, at least in this lifetime.

Now, a prosthetic hand that augments the real hand? Sure, I'll take two.

BTW, I'm already a cyborg. There's a device in my left eye that replaces its lens. Want one? Usually gives you 20/20 or better vision (mine's 10/16 in that eye), costs $7k per eye, and they

Call me old-fashioned and socialist, but here in the UK third party liability insurance would cover these costs and no jury would be involved. It might be tricky convincing the insurance company to pay $5m though. The solution to that is to nationalise the people who make the bionic arms and reduce the absurd profiteering.

Your hypothetical hypothesis is bullocks, as the Brits say. No jury would award only a year's salary to someone who could no longer work in their profession. As Judge Judy says, "that's redikolus".

However, I think an optician could still work with only one arm, but costing a homeless person an arm is going to cost you millions, let alone a professional. So you might want to stay off that phone when you're driving, and make sure your insurance is current.

No waiver can waive legal rights, and negligence can never be waived for. Just going in to a trial with a "he cut off my hand (at my request)" sob story may be sufficient for winning a negligence trial, even if no actual negligence occurred.

You don't have a "right" to a trial, except in criminal cases. And most of the mandatory arbitration clauses are illegal because they are defacto unfair when one party selects mediators, or other unfair control over the "fair" process required.

In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.

Nerves only regenerate very slowly if at all but, they are the one part of the body most likely to respond to stem cell treatment. In this case the other hand might be a stem cell solution in five to ten years time, how likely, a pretty good chance. Hand replacement, perhaps a century or more away. Lesson to learn in gambling, go with the odds.

Not all prosthetic hands are controlled via EMGs. Actually, the majority are what are called "body powered [google.com]." Through the socket and harness, you tension a cable using the shoulder and back muscles, and that is used to control the hand. Typically, the cable directly actuates the prosthesis, like the cable on a bike directly actuating the brakes. In other cases, the cable is a linear potentiometer, and the prosthesis uses that input to actuate motors. It may sound like a kludge, but wearers can achieve i

I'm not certain they're taking the best approach on that. It seems they don't need to replace any hardware, just the control cables. Put a chip in her brain, run wires from it under the skin through a signal processor to the hand. Shy might have to wear a circuit board on her forearm to process and amplify the signal, but would be able to use her existing hand.

The real question is why she doesn't want to use FES (Functional Electrical Stimulation) of her existing musculature. The interface is going to be the same as with a fully mechanical robotic hand, and the aesthetic outcome far superior.

Agreed. That would use her existing muscles, with artificial stimulation. A device worn on the forearm to stimulate those muscles would be less frightening than something like the LukeArm.

Still, I would try to repair the damaged organic system first. There have been many breakthroughs in nerve regeneration in the peripheral nervous system that would be helpful, and artifical stimulation would be a great suppliment to that.

Granted, overall it's superior, but fake hands can do different individual things better, too. A prosthetic hand could easily be stronger than a real hand, for example. I don't know if anybody has worked on this, but I'm sure it's possible to do so. A prosthetic hand could also have more movement options. It could spin, for example, or the fingers could go all of the way back.

I think that under certain conditions, for certain people, a prosthetic limb could be better than a real one.

I think you're right.however, it's probably easier to make robot fingers then exoskeleton fingers. although I wouldn't bet on it.furthermore, the doctor is probably interested in working with amputees in the future, so he wants to have experience with that.

Even more awesome would be to put her own skin back on top of the bionic hand. Even more awesome than that would be if they could retain the sensory nerves in the skin while doing this (although it would make the slice-skin-open-show-robot-inside trick like on terminator a bit hurty)

I guess we're a decade or two away from a bionic hand that is maintenance free enough to allow this, plus all the issues of keeping the skin alive without being attached to an actual hand, and by then hopefully we can just grow

Synthetic prostheses will probably end up being a dead end, for normal people at least. If your goal is to get someone back to 100% function of their original organic hand (or an idealized perfectly functional human hand if it was already malfunctioning from birth) then growing a new hand, either in situ or in a lab for later grafting, seems more likely. After all, we carry around everything we need to grow more body parts--that's how you got your original hands. Coaxing the body to do that trick again will likely be accomplished before we can make a synthetic body part that works just as well as a real one.

I see no problem with replacing a hand. I want to replace my entire body. Until we know how to digitize the brain it would probably have to be a brain in an enclosure inside a robot body but later the goal would be to replace the brain. Do synapse by synapse replacement while you are awake and by the end you can think thousands to millions of time faster and at no time did you ever die.

Imagine all you could learn and see with a fully robotic body. You could explore space, many places on this planet that humans can't go and you would live long enough to see participate in many things that humans are only beginning to work on now. I would love to live for millions to billions of years and learn everything that I could.

Once you are fully digital you could even make probes to send down to new planets and it would feel just like you where there but if the probe is destroyed you would be fine since you could run it on remote. You could even have your brain be a massively redundant computer with stable memory in case of full power loss. Humans bodies are just not up to what I want to do and I prefer to go the technology route and fix the problem instead of accepting the limitations of what humans can do. We have been at our best trying to strive beyond what we can do, even if we don't reach our goal we learn a lot in the process. Artificial eyes, ears, legs, arms etc will help many people.

Replacing non-functional limbs with functional prosthetics has been going on for decades. Decades ago this was controversial, especially for children with birth defect limb deficiencies. My father-in-law, Dr. Leon M. Kruger, was the chief surgeon at a Shriners Hospital for Crippled Children. He conducted and published a study following children as they grew up, comparing measures of success in life skills, schooling, careers, happiness, etc. for those who did or did not have amputations. The success of those with amputations and prosthetics far exceeded those who kept the nonfunctional hands, arms, feet or legs. As they grew up, many of these children sent Dr. Kruger movies of themselves engaged in sports, riding motorcycles, etc.
One favorite story was of a motorcyclist with a prosthetic who was in an accident. He was stuck in a position unable to remove his prosthetic which was pinned down under the motorcycle. He shouted to the first responders, "Take off my leg. Take off my leg."
They told him not to worry, they could get him out with amputation. He most emphatically told them he'd be able to get himself away if they would just disconnect his leg.
You might consider that a sick story. He thought it was funny, as did the teenager swimming in a lake in the summer of 1975 who grabbed onto the dock, stuck his stump in the air, and yelled, "Shark, Shark."

One favorite story was of a motorcyclist with a prosthetic who was in an accident. He was stuck in a position unable to remove his prosthetic which was pinned down under the motorcycle. He shouted to the first responders, "Take off my leg. Take off my leg."

They told him not to worry, they could get him out with amputation. He most emphatically told them he'd be able to get himself away if they would just disconnect his leg.

Presumably you meant "they could get him out without amputation"? Not nazi-ing, just very confused at the text as-is. But a good story.

Doesn't this sound a bit drastic? Damn, if it were me I'd be hax0ring it.

There's groups on places like the Open Prosthetic Project, who could design something for a use case like this. Probably for less than the cost of a "replacement."

Why remove her hand, when you could support it with a rigid exoskeleton? Minimalist carbon fiber spars and rings (a ring around each knuckle), very light but strong, and little external actuators that sit in the wrist / forearm. Nylon worm gear and a little 12V DC motor for each digit. Run back to an Arduino or similar and pull input from the last-known-good nerves around the base of the arm. Basically support the (numb) arm in position and have the exoskeleton move it around. Lock the wrist in the first iteration as you refine the design. Lots of little vacuum actuated suckers that keep the whole shebang stuck to the skin (creepy, but secure!)

A hundred bucks of carbon fiber, maybe a couple thousand bucks of really good fasteners and electronics, tubing, motors, pump, rubber and CNC work. $10,000 a month (for 3-6 months, depending) to a hacker who knows what he's doing.

I wouldn't trust an open-source hacker to program my artificial arm. Documentation would be limited to object member descriptions and the damned thing would probably integrate a webcam so it could give Steve Ballmer the finger every time it saw him.

Well most computing hardware is etched onto the fairly stable medium of silicon. Most cells, pretty much all of them in persons have membranes have membranes composed of phospholipids studded with proteins. Which substrate seems friendlier to work with.

We're going to replace a hand with some sort of toy robot hand with a few motors in it that will not work anywhere near like a real hand.

That's not the comparison she gets to make. Her options are a human hand that doesn't work, a hook, or a "toy robot hand." She doesn't get to wait for future technologies that might never come to apss.

Did you ever stop to think that she spent 12 years waiting for "future technologies" and that a bionic hand is just that?

Of course. I have no doubt that the prosthetics available today are well ahead of what was available a decade ago. It's just that the parent post made it seem like she no longer had the choice to wait for even more improvement in the technology; as if she had to decide - right now - between a forever limp arm, a hook, or a robotic hand. That's wrong. The option to wait is always there, right up to the point where she goes under for the surgery. If she learns of a procedure of using implanted compute

It's weird how some people think Slashdot is full of people who all have the exact same opinion.

From what I've seen, Slashdot is a place where people are sure that Space Elevators will never, ever happen, and are completely impossible; and that Microsoft is the greatest company with the best products.

It's called resources, you idiot. The moon and asteroids are full of valuable minerals, and you don't have to wreck the environment to extract them. The sun puts out more energy than we could conceivably need, and in space there's no atmosphere or night/day to hinder your acquisition of that energy.

We think we have all this "technology" but we are really only good at a few things. Burning fossil fuels in a turbine, mass-producing items and putting transistors on a tiny chip so we can play video games

Really? That is how you sum up all of human endevour? We have come so far and acheived so much since we came down from the trees. We have sent space ships out beyond our solar system, and explored the depths of the ocean that would crush a man if he ventured that far down. We can repair our bodies in extrodinary ways that were unheard of even 50 years ago. Doctors can use robots to perform surgery on people half a world away. We can make a robotic hand for someone. We made the world a smaller place by allowing us to talk to each other anywhere we want. We made Jersey Shore.

OK, we still have a long way to go, but why not see that as an exciting opportunity rather than bitch and moan that we haven't invented everything yet.

Why can't we fix a few grams of living matter? Because we aren't nearly as clever as we think we are.

Do you really think that the doctors in this case are so deluded that they think that they can fix this woman's hand? Obviously not, otherwise we would not be talking about fitting a bionic hand. Do you think the woman thinks that we are so clever that we can fix her hand? Obviously not, otherwise we would not be talking about fitting a bionic hand (again).

So who is it that thinks we are more clever than we really are? Not the people in the story. Not the people posting here. I know that it is certainly not you. You are too busy seeing the negative in everything around you. Maybe you are just still bitter that we don't all have flying cars like the old science fiction stories promised you when you were a child.